The Burden of Southern History

Preface to the Third Edition

Prejace to the Third Edition THE TWO REVISIONS OF THE ORIGINAL EDITION OF 1960, THE first in 1968 and this, the second, have had much the same purpose: to test the validity of the two thematic essays, "The Search for Southern Identity" and "The Irony of Southern History." How have these essays and the others illustrating and supporting them held up against the winds of change and met the tests of time? What modifications, if any, have become necessary, and must concessions be made to critics? To answer these questions I have in both revised editions called to witness developments that are more national and recent than Southern and historical in character and may therefore seem less related to the subjects suggested by the book's title. The fact is, however, that from the start the book was addressed to Southern history as it relates to and differs from national experience and myth, and to the past as it relates to the present. In the 1968 revision two essays were added. The first, "What Happened to the Civil Rights Movement," addresses changes and racial relations, violent and nonviolent, xxii PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION as they have affected Southern identity and the irony of the regional experience. The other, "A Second Look at the Theme of Irony," uses the war in Vietnam as a test of the themes of both the South's distinctiveness and the ironies of its history, in both of which certain modifications are considered. The present edition adds three more essays. For inspiring the chief of them I am indebted to John B. Boles. As editor of The Journal of Southern History he invited my reflections on "The Irony of Southern History" for the fortieth anniversary of its original publication in The Journal in 1953. I responded with the essay "Look Away, Look Away," giving special attention to how the theme of irony accommodates the changes that four decades have brought to Southern identity and distinctiveness,and the changes in racial relations. In the earlier editions of the book I have made it a point to acknowledge the debt I think Southern historians owe to the eruption of creative energy in the region that was known in arts and letters as the Southern Renaissance. Novelists in particular seem responsible for having awakened a new and keener and more critical interest in regional history and a consciousness of the past in the present. Here I have singled out for tributes two writers, William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren. I have had a more personal relationship with Warren than with Faulkner. It was to Warren that the book was dedicated in 1960, and it was to his express admonition to "accept the past and its burden" that my book owes its title. C. V. W. New Haven August, 1993 ...